Cancer rising: Investigating the deadly increase in cancers in younger people
As cancer diagnoses in the under-50s soar, researchers are focusing on environmental as well as dietary causes – including a possible link between microplastics and bowel cancer, writes Sarah Catherall.
When David Shorter was diagnosed with aggressive stage four colorectal cancer early last year, the now 44-year-old looked back on his life searching for clues on what caused it. The Aucklander was fit and healthy enough, with no family history of bowel cancer. So, like many other cancer patients, he looked for signs of environmental causes.
Did six months working in a boatbuilding yard with chemicals spraying around him when he was 19 contribute to the growth of a tumour in his gut? Or was it the fact he was born nine weeks premature by caesarean?
At the time of diagnosis, he admits his diet “could have probably been better’‘, but he didn’t drink much alcohol and had never touched a cigarette.
The IT specialist had done enough reading on microplastics, too, to ponder if the plastic drink bottles and cooking ladles might have contributed to his cancer – along with other microplastics he might have ingested. He went through his kitchen and threw them all out. “I never had a medical issue before this. It came as such a shock. I guess the only thing is my diet could have probably been better,” he says.
He was speaking from the side of a swimming pool as he watched his children, aged 9 and 7, at swimming lessons. A surveillance scan in January found a cancerous lymph node in his liver, which was removed. Since then he has had two of six rounds of folfox ‒ a chemotherapy regime used to treat mestatistic bowel cancer. In palliative care since his diagnosis, Shorter is determined to spend as much time as he can with his family.
“My message is don’t wait until you’re terminally ill to prioritise what is important.
“Also, be your own health advocate. I had strange bowel symptoms for about a year but I put it down to being over 40 and maybe my digestive system was changing. I’d encourage anyone to go and see a doctor, no matter your age, and definitely get a colonoscopy, and I’d also encourage people to talk about their bowel motions.‘’*
Cancer under 50
Many cancers are rising in the under-50s and scientists and doctors around the globe are trying to work out why. Globally, diagnoses and deaths related to early-onset cancers ‒ affecting patients younger than 50 ‒ rose by 79% and 28% respectively from 1990 to 2019, according to a recent study published in the medical journal BMJ Oncology. Cancers with the highest death tolls were those of the breast, windpipe, lung, bowel and stomach.
The American Cancer Society says the under-50s are the only age group with a rising risk of developing 17 different types of cancer, and 12 of these are obesity-related. Nine of the cancers increasing in young people had been declining in older generations: estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, cancers of the uterus, bowel, stomach, gallbladder, ovaries, testicles and anus, and Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of blood cancer, in men.